Video game-themed board games

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I pitched an article on board games based on video games months and months ago, but it’s only just been published on Eurogamer. It turned out to be a much bigger undertaking than I thought.

My confused face sums up XCOM The Board Game.

My initial idea was to do a round up of all of the video-game-themed board games on the market, but a bit of reasearch revealed that there are far more of them than I realised – the board game scene really has exploded in recent years. So I revised my goals, and instead decided to pick just a handful of the more well known ones. But even this proved tricky.

The trouble with board games is that you need a group of people to play them with, as well as someone who knows the rules, not to mention a full evening or two spare to play them thoroughly. As hyou’ll see in the article, fulfilling these criteria wasn’t always easy:

I ended up reviewing three games in the end – XCOM, Street Fighter II and The Witcher – but there are plenty more that I could have done, like the Civilization and Portal board games. Hopefully I can cover them in a follow-up article…

Published by Lucius P. Merriweather

3 Comments

I’ve been curious about the XCOM game for a while. Disappointing to hear. XCOM at its core is supposed to be really difficult, but it sound like they made the board game just too tough. When it takes so much effort to set up board games nights, no one wants something that excruciatingly difficult. I tend to agree that maybe the base-building stuff should have been ditched for just the battlefield strategy side.